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jfruhlinger writes "After some prickly negotiations with the German government's privacy regulators, Google got permission to launch its Street View service for German addresses, so long as people had the right to opt out and choose to have only a blurred version of their homes on the service. But it turns out that iPhone and iPad users can see those buildings after all."

Those aren't photos of your house! Google uses photos of houses from a Universe which is only fractionally different from ours. The terrain's totally the same there. The only difference is that 99% of the people use Linux except for an exclusive club of Microsoft users.

Those aren't photos of your house! Google uses photos of houses from a Universe which is only fractionally different from ours. The terrain's totally the same there. The only difference is that 99% of the people use Linux except for an exclusive club of Microsoft users.

If you could zoom in on the telly sets, you could probably grab a few scenes from the later episodes of firefly. Heck, if you could get the streetview guys to drive fast enough and if enough people were watching the show (windows open, presumably), you could probably watch an entire episode.

Unfortunately, in the 4th season, the show kinda jumped the shark with that whole love triangle between Mal, Inara, and River....that's not even mentioning the introduction of that robotic dog, Quan, or when Kaylee turned out to be the one to design an interstellar drive, and they went to find aliens....really disappointing!

Actually this neatly explains the apparent inability of Google to actually delete the images (RTFA) as requested by the DPA. It seems to be one of those things where there are only two normal explanations - incompetence of the Google engineers to actually delete data, or deliberate ignoring of the request to delete. So which is it Google? Do you claim to be incompetent or do you think you're big enough to ignore Government?:)

Honestly, my first question is, is it Google or the German government ignoring the law here? I'm not entirely familiar with German law, granted, and it does have some oddities, but I'm not certain under what legal theory an "opt out" right could be created. If I took a photo of some friends on a public street in Germany and posted it on a website, with a home in the background, would the homeowner have the right under German law to demand I blur the home or take down the photo? And if they wouldn't, what's

It appears that here in Germany, we don't care much whether our ISP is obliged to keep all our internet traffic on file for months, our web access can be arbitrarily and secretly limited, our radio organizations can demand listener fees from everyone with an internet connection and shit like ACTA can get dictated on us from the copyright mafia...... but DON'T YOU DARE put a photo of my HOUSE on the INTERNET.

Thanks for the tea party, America; at least that way there are a few things left we can feel smugly superior about.

The BILD tabloid wouldn't dream of putting up a headline saying "Intellectual Property companies would like to spy on every citizen's internet access." Guess what they did report on in giant letters.:P

It's BILD. Between their obvious bias, lack of research, failure to follow commonly accepted journalistic standards and all-around lack of professionalism they're often indistinguishable from satire magazines. I mean, this is the "newspaper" that tried to tell us that DSLAMs can upsample SD content to full-quality HD using "fiber glass refiners".

If anything, BILD reporting on $ENTITY doing something wrong is an indicator that $ENTITY is innocent and in fact isn't even directly involved at all. Of course t

The craziest thing is that "panorama photography" has been explicitly allowed by law in Germany for ages and nobody seemed to have a problem with it. Now they're looking to severely restrict the right to take pictures in public space, because apparently now your private property extends to blurry images of your house facade. But I'm sure that when they pass Lex Google Street View, there will be a sweeping exemption for camera surveillance by government and business. Germans actually love being watched as lo

The craziest thing is that "panorama photography" has been explicitly allowed by law in Germany for ages and nobody seemed to have a problem with it. Now they're looking to severely restrict the right to take pictures in public space, because apparently now your private property extends to blurry images of your house facade...Germans actually love being watched as long as it's their own Big Brother who watches them, not some American company.

That's a cheap shot. What's happening is that their government (and some of their media) are distracting the German people from the real problem by making a big deal out of Google. Germany has very strict "data protection laws" ("Datenschutz") that are ostensibly meant to safeguard individual privacy. They don't: they only prevent individuals from finding out stuff—corporations and the government are not hampered a bit by these laws.

That depends entirely on who you list in "we". If you dislike all those things, become a member of the Pirate Party and help change things. A lot of people here in Germany care, but like most of the western democracies, our politics has become a quagmire of lobbyism, stupidity and greed. It'll take some effort to change things, and that effort isn't whining on/.

Maybe I didn't look long enough, but from what I can tell, the streetview coverage in Germany at this time is close to nil. Only a small part of a small village which, oh surprise, has a "blacked out house" is present. To me, this seems like either a function test for the feature or a demonstration on how the feature could work to the interested people. Either way, this would also explain the lapse in mobile versions of google maps.

Or did they already rollback on streetview release for Germany after enablin

The German government may pretend that hiding images of buildings and people visible from public streets is "privacy" but it's merely privacy theater.

Germany's government has one of the wost records on privacy among European nations, pushing for data retention, registration of religions beliefs with the government, extensive electronic government surveillance, even aerial photography of people's backyards.

So, don't feed the German government trolls: don't call this restriction of photography "privacy".

If Google wanted to get the issue more attention, it could have blocked the entire service for the entire country. One of two things would happen... people would protest their government and ask that the service be reinstated through a change in laws or an exemption... or a Google competitor would provide the services with the blurring feature. I'm guessing the changes of the second happening were too high. The blurring is a relatively easy thing for them to implement, but sometimes it's nice to force an

a Google competitor would provide the services with the blurring feature

Actually, a German company provides a kind of street view without blurring whatsoever, and has a playground search engine too, and people apparently like it.But when Google does it, it is somehow violation of privacy.

This only happens if you really do not understand your own application. In addition, anybody with at least a bit security knowledge would have blurred in the source material, thereby making this screwup impossible.

Well, they would of course keep the unblurred material at some not publicly accessible place, but the point is that blurring would be done directly on the images used for the service, instead of added dynamically. That way, something would be blurred either everywhere or nowhere.